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After years of activism by local free software advocates, San Francisco, in particular, and California have both adopted policies requiring all government software purchases to include an evaluation of free software!

The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Google's business activities after complaints from three European companies. The companies, which offer services similar to Google's, believe that Google actively demotes their rankings in its search results because they are competitors.

Last month saw the launch of http://www.data.gov.uk web site not only built on Open Source Technology but designed to give UK-data back to the UK-people. In the same month both UK political parties restated their total commitment to Open Source software. What is going on? What has happened to the forces of darkness?

Horizons Regional Council "would be remiss not to investigate alternatives" to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.

Last Friday, after four years of deliberation, representatives of all parties in the Danish parliament (Folketing) reached an agreement to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as their official format for saving documents from April 2011. Initially, the decision will not affect any regional or communal authorities; a decision in this respect is to follow at a later stage.

"The OpenNet Initiative is proud to release its 2009 Year in Review, a look into instances of filtering, surveillance, and information warfare around the world in 2009 [...] The OpenNet Initiative estimates that at the end of 2009, 32% of all Internet users were accessing a filtered version of the Internet."

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list. In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

Only three days after posting my blog regarding the plight of Google's Chinese customers and how their data is now at the whims of a US-based company and its conflict with the Chinese government, I read about the issues of SourceForge.net and the U.S. State Department's Export lists and how the data stored in a US-based company, sometimes created by non-U.S.

Polish government wants to enforce Internet filtering to eliminate online gambling and child pornography. Everything for the benefit of our children, as this is the argument which is hard to stay against.

The Chinese are no longer playing a game of whispers when it comes to mouthing off about Google’s smackdown two weeks ago, with the country’s media now openly dissing the Internet giant, and the US government too for good measure.

"The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a multilateral trade agreement being negotiated, mostly between OECD countries, in total secrecy. 7th round of negociations from Jan 26th to Jan 29th 2009, in Mexico, is a perfect occasion for exposing ACTA and raise awareness bout how dangerous it is for our fundamental freedoms..."